The Changeling Game, Chapter 91

91.
Pursued by a Scourging Sun

Crematoria was the strangest world Kyra had ever been on, she thought as she pursued Riddick across its rocky surface.

Tizzy had told her how bizarre it was, how it seemed to violate almost all the rules of planetary physics and then some. That had come up in conversation during their first week on Tangiers Prime, while her little sister had been building fake IDs for the two of them and Tomlin, and the talk had turned to various prison systems in the Federacy.

“Most planets,” Tizzy had said even as her fingers flew over the key glyphs on her tablet, “the coldest time of the night is right before sunrise and the hottest time is right before sunset. Then the temperature starts to rise, or fall, toward the other peak. So you’d think that it’d be too cold to survive even a few seconds outside in the hour before sunrise, and that early to mid-morning, and sometime late at night, would be about the only hours you could safely survive a world with that temperature range. Not how it works there, and it took scientists decades to figure out why.”

Kyra was running through the why even as she recalled Tizzy’s words. The weirdest volcanic system on any world ran under the lava fields she was sprinting across, one that pumped out hydrogen and oxygen, in addition to methane and more traditional volcanic gases.

“Some guy from New Oxford figured it out a century ago,” Tizzy had continued. Somehow she could type one thing and talk about something else without getting confused, a feat that Kyra had considered herculean. “The planet’s core is made up of metallic hydrogen. Must’ve once been a gas giant, maybe a brown dwarf, before Igneon went protostar on it. Blew away most of its gases except the ones that had been locked inside what used to be its mantle, which froze on the spot and became its new crust.”

Froze into twisted, convoluted basalt shapes that Kyra had to run across. Froze into gargantuan knives of volcanic glass. Froze into an impossible world. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, all her intention focused on keeping up with Riddick. If you can’t keep up, don’t step up, he’d told her. So far, she was doing a better job of keeping up than any of the few others who had joined them on the run.

“And Igneon’s a young star,” Tizzy had continued. “All this shit happened maybe five hundred years ago. People back on old Earth saw it ignite on their telescopes. That’s how it got its name. So all those gases locked under the mantle had been under crazy levels of pressure before the planet lost its original atmosphere. With that pressure gone, they’re escaping, but it’s gonna take another ten thousand years, minimum, before they all do.”

“What’s that all mean, though?” she’d asked. Tizzy was a fount of fascinating knowledge, the kinds of things that the New Christy Fathers had insisted girls didn’t need to know about. Something about the way she shared it made it easy to understand, too.

“Well, the planet pumps out enough gases that you have a more or less breathable atmosphere.” Tizzy had grimaced. “Kind of. As long as you don’t encounter a toxic vent and as long as you stay out of the sun. The mixture is breathable but seriously flammable. Like, explosively so. Not enough nitrogen in the mix. And not enough upper atmosphere to filter most of the sunlight, either. When the sun hits it, the atmosphere starts heating up fast, and within a few minutes it reaches the temperature you need for spontaneous combustion.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“Swear to God. So right along the dawn line, you have this traveling explosion. After an hour or two, all the atmosphere has burned off in an area. The temperature climbs to about seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit—that’s three-seventy-ish Celcius—in the burn zone. But after the atmosphere burns off, under the shadow of the burn cloud, it drops down to negative three hundred Fahrenheit, or about one-eighty-five-ish Celcius. That’s close to the temperature where nitrogen—if the planet had much of it, anyway—where it freezes. You ever see what happens to something you put in liquid nitrogen?”

When Kyra had shaken her head, Tizzy had pulled up a vid on her tablet to show her. Someone dipped a rosebud into a flask of liquid; when it emerged it was covered with frost. A moment later, with a gentle tap on a table’s surface, it shattered into dozens of fragments.

“Fuck, Jack…”

Had she really called Tizzy “Jack” back then? Huh.

Tizzy shuddered theatrically. “You walk out into that temperature and you’re dead before you even notice it’s cold. Fortunately, even though that’s the planetary low, it doesn’t stay there for long. More gases pump up and ignite on the spot, and warm things up a little while they burn off. That goes on all day. Then the sun sets. The temperature drops crazy-low again, but the burn also ends. And then the planet keeps pumping out more gases, which take up the heat stored in the rocks from the day’s burn. By a few hours before dawn, you can walk around on the surface and survive. The place becomes almost comfortable about half an hour before the sun returns. And then boom, the whole shitshow starts over again.”

“And they put a prison on a planet like that?” Kyra had shaken her head in wonder.

“Turns out there are subterranean cave systems all over the place there, and some of them have stable atmospheres and even some decent temperatures. The prison’s in one of those systems. My—” For a moment, Tizzy hesitated, and then continued. “Paris told me that the only part of the prison complex that has any real security systems in it is the underground passage between the prison and the hangar that supply ships dock in. As long as nobody can get into that, they have no hope of surviving outside of the prison itself.”

And yet here we are, Kyra thought, running across the surface and hoping we can outrun the dawn…

Only the Guv, Sybar, and two other men from the Guv’s gang had chosen to join her and Riddick on the run. Everyone else had decided that the risk was too great, planning instead to use Toombs and Logan as hostages—“bargaining chips,” Kyra had insisted—to get relief supplies flown in by the prison guild. They’d agreed on a story, which Toombs and Logan would, perforce, have to agree with too, in which raiders had attacked the prison only to be successfully driven off by the original guard contingent, all of whom had sacrificed their lives in the process. Kyra had been party to worse lies.

The only thing that might complicate that story would be if the surviving guards succeeded in making it to the hangar and launching. But if they did, she doubted she’d be in a position to care what happened next in the prison.

It had been three hours until sunrise when they’d begun the run. With almost thirty klicks to cover, through brutal terrain, the odds of successfully negotiating the distance were slim enough that there had been almost no takers. The four who had joined them—the Guv, Sybar, and two men the Guv had taken under his wing in just the last year—were all political prisoners who officially didn’t exist on the prison rolls as themselves, and who suspected the Guild had been party to their abductions and incarcerations. Racing against the dawn seemed like better odds to them than dealing with whatever shakeups were facing the prison when a new Warden arrived.

Kyra had heard of athletes who could complete a ten-klick race in under half an hour, but she had a feeling that they were going to need the whole three hours to make it thirty klicks, themselves. Especially given the ashy volcanic field ahead.

She had already shed her coat, sweater, and sleeved top—which she had still needed when they stepped out on the surface—and the heat was building. Tizzy was right that the surface became habitable a few hours before dawn, but she’d failed to mention how uncomfortable “habitable” could be.

They could, theoretically, outrun the guards. The subterranean passage that those men had to follow was convoluted and twisting, as the sled track had been, and only a few of them were in decent shape. Aside from a few dangerous surface features, Riddick could take her and the Guv’s men in a nearly straight line. Only hardly anyone in the prison had believed he was capable of doing any such thing.

They don’t know him like I do, Kyra told herself as she followed him into the ashfall.

Did she know him?

She and Tizzy had followed him into the darkness, years before, and he had brought them to safety, only—

—only she had no memory of Tizzy running beside her on that journey, and her hands, holding the light coils as she tried to illuminate the dark, had looked strangely different from her own…

Whose memories were those?

The hands had looked much like Tizzy’s as her fingers had flown over the key glyphs on her tablet, as they had stroked Sebby’s carapace. As if her memories were of inhabiting her little sister’s body somehow.

Ahead of her, she saw Riddick jerk his head up and to the side, as though sensing something. He put on a burst of speed and vanished into the ashfall.

Fuck! Covering her nose and mouth with a cloth against the ash—she had an odd memory of watching a vid, when she was little and still hadn’t left Old Earth, about a mountain named after a saint that had exploded a century or so earlier, and how volcanic ash, if breathed in, turned into cement in the breather’s lungs—she tried to put on a burst of speed to keep up.

Where are you, Riddick? she called into the gloom. If she could hear him, maybe he could hear her.

Keep moving, Kyra. You’re doing fine. Keep running. You’ll see me soon.

So Tizzy had been right about him being an esper, too. She followed the path her feet found through the rocky terrain as an eerie prickle, a sense of someone watching her, grew.

DUCK!

She obeyed, unable to do anything else in response to the powerful command, and lunged to the side. Two loud cracks sounded from somewhere in the ashfall.

One of the Guv’s friends—Björn, a man who spoke little and often muttered to himself in a language others said was Norwegian—let out a choking gasp from beside her and pitched forward, blood spreading from a wound in his back.

Fuck! Who’s shooting?

We’ve caught up with the guards, Riddick murmured in her head. They’re takin’ issue with that.

In seconds, it turned into an open battle. The Guv was dragging Björn out of the line of fire while both Sybar and the fourth man—Rosales, a guy who generally treated her with respect but sometimes fantasized about playing with her feet—began shooting at… what, exactly? She’d ducked behind an outcropping of rock and couldn’t see any­thing—

The fuck, Kyra? Get that head back down!

The rock she’d been peering over exploded a second after she ducked back below it, showering her with shrapnel. She unlimbered one of her own guns, taken from the control room, and fired back at the mound she’d caught a quick glimpse of. Battle rage was taking over.

Emerging from hiding, she raced for the mound, aiming her shots at the small space the guards were peering out of. The fucking thing was closing! She kept firing. She couldn’t stop, even as the opening sealed. Two fucking years of those bastards trying to arrange her hideous death had her wishing she knew how to use her weird telekinesis thing on something other than her own body. She wanted to make their blood boil and their organs explode. Especially Yuri’s.

She kicked at the mound in fury. You fucked your pig mothers to death and ate their bacon the next day!

Amused disbelief answered her. Riddick, halfway up a rocky hill, was watching her. He turned and began climbing again.

Forcing herself to let go of the urge to tear open the mound somehow, or spend hours trying, she followed.

“What was that?” Riddick demanded as she caught up with him. “You don’t care if you live or die?”

Not as long as I’m with you when it hap­pens— Fuck. She hoped he hadn’t heard that.

“If I kill them first,” she answered instead, half facetious, “not really.”

It wasn’t like she’d expected to live more than a few more years at the most in that hellhole. Her hopes had narrowed to hiding in Elsewhere for the rest of her life or achieving a fast death in preference to the four days of excruciating payback Yuri had been commissioned to inflict upon her. One of the only joys she’d had left was playing executioner to some of Crematoria’s nastiest bits of scum, even if the Guv did tell her it was “bringing shame to the game.” And the nastiest bits of scum of all were the guards themselves.

She followed Riddick as he leapt onto a rocky promontory over a glowing pit. The ashfall had lightened to almost nothing.

“Maybe I do,” he growled.

It startled her, his admission that her fate mattered to him. She’d thought he was disappointed to find her there instead of Tizzy—everybody seemed to gravitate to her little sister while she was stuck in the shadows—but now maybe he was telling her that he’d come for her—

“Keep moving!” he roared, shaking her out of her reverie. She followed him across the promontory, aware that the Guv, Sybar, and Rosales were running near them. Björn, apparently, had been left behind.

She wiped ash off of her body and out of her hair as she ran. The lava fields were behind them now, but there was a cliff ahead that they would need to climb.

“Hangar’s just on the other side,” Riddick told them when they reached it.

“So near and yet so far,” the Guv muttered, shaking his head. “We’re going to lose the lead we have on the guards.”

“If we keep jaw-jackin’ about it,” Riddick agreed, “yeah. C’mon.”

Although the Guv had brought rope for the climb, it remained coiled over his shoulder as they free-handed their way up. They were in Crematoria’s twilight hour, which struck Kyra as simultaneously good and bad. Good because she could see the handholds and footholds she needed to grab onto.

Bad because that meant sunrise was getting close.

The rock was porous, sometimes crumbling in her grip or under the toes of her boots as she worked her way higher, but there were plenty of places to grab onto. She felt like she was nearing the top, but she had the horrible suspicion it wasn’t near enough. Riddick, Sybar, and the Guv were higher up on the cliff face, while she and Rosales had fallen behind.

“Kyra?” Riddick called from above her.

Oh for God’s sake…

“KYRA!”

“What?” she screamed up at him. Kinda busy at the moment, god damn it!

“Get that ass moving!” he roared.

Fuck. They were nearly out of time. She tried to will more strength into her arms and legs as she reached for the next handholds—

Light bloomed around her, brilliant and scalding. The rock beneath her hands began heating up.

Shit! Shit!

There was a shadowed crevasse near her, big enough for her to duck inside. She lunged into it. Maybe there were passages through the cliff face—

No such luck. It was a dead end. In moments, it would be flooded with light too.

Gonna have to keep climbing.

She grabbed for the rocks again, but they were painfully hot. Her handguards began to sizzle as she snatched her hands back.

I’m dead. Fuck. I’m gonna die here. She slid to the floor of the crevasse as the air began to heat up.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but—

Not like this… “Riddick?”

No answer. But she could feel him listening.

“Remember what I said about not caring if I lived or died?” God, she felt so stupid for saying all that now. So much bravado, for what? “You knew I was kidding, right?”

Please don’t leave me here. Please… If anyone in the ’verse could save her, it would be him. I don’t wanna die. I’ve barely had a chance to live…

A rumbling sound was growing louder. She knew what that had to be. The air itself would begin to burn soon. She didn’t want to look, but she found herself turning to see out of the crevasse’s opening.

Tizzy had called it a “traveling explosion.” She hadn’t been exaggerating.

Kyra rose to her feet and took a deep breath. Would it be fast? She didn’t want to have to feel her body burning. Would it be better to throw herself off the cliff before the fire reached her?

She didn’t know what to do. She was rooted in place, watching the approaching doom.

“Your rope!” she heard Riddick shout above her. “Gimme your rope! And your water. All of it!”

Hold on, kid. I’m comin’.

“Stay in the shadow of the mountain,” she heard him telling the Guv and Sybar. “Don’t wait for me. Run!”

The explosion had almost reached the base of the cliff. It was too late to do anything.

Except scream. “Riddick!”

He was flying toward her, left hand holding onto a rope as his right arm reached for her—

She felt something else pulling at her as well, lifting her off her feet and toward him.

Oh my God.

Tizzy hadn’t been making shit up when she’d talked about telekinesis, claiming it was a real thing and that Kyra’s mother had probably used it in her magic acts. Riddick had it, too. He was controlling the arc of the rope with it and was pulling her to him. The expression on his face was pure agony.

His arm wrapped around her and they were flying together, her body pressed to his.

I got ya, kid…

They soared upward, the world roaring around them, and then she was falling, rolling on the shadowed clifftop as a massive, superheated cloud of plasma crashed against the cliff face and thundered upward into the sky.

She was alive. Unharmed. No sign of damage anywhere on her body, even if she suspected she’d sport some bruises in a few hours from her landing.

Something was hissing near her. She looked up—

Steam was rising from all over Riddick’s body as he rose from a crouch.

Oh fuck, he got scalded for me—

He turned to face, her, wreathed in the steam of the water that had boiled away on him, and met her gaze. Unharmed. Unburned.

The “hellhounds” were right, she thought, feeling her infatuation turn into something new and even more powerful. He’s a fucking god.

And he’d come back. For her.

“C’mon,” he said, offering her his hand. She had the strange feeling that, if only they had more time, he might have kissed her. “Got a few minutes before the sun catches up to us again.”

She took his hand, knowing that she’d follow him anywhere, Heaven or Hell, if he asked.

The Guv’s rope had been meant for the descent on the other side, she suspected, but it had burnt up just moments before. Fortunately, the slope was easier, the sun’s tumult carving less of it away on the leeward side. She could see how the base of the valley had been smoothed and shaped by human hands to create a runway lined with low structures at regular intervals, leading to a natural cavern that had been reshaped, opened wider, and then sealed with a smooth metal door. The hangar. The Guv and Sybar had reached a series of basalt ridges sculpted by violent lava flows and were making their way toward the structure. It didn’t take long to catch up with them.

Some strange, rhythmic thrumming, a deep sound on the edge of hearing, was filling Kyra’s ears. What was that?

“There it is,” the Guv was saying to Sybar, beginning to crawl forward. Riddick’s arm flashed out and he grabbed the other man’s leg at the ankle.

Both men looked genuinely shocked to see them alive.

“Listen,” Riddick growled.

The thrumming sound was real, Kyra realized. He heard it, too.

Damn right I hear ’em. He turned to look at her for a second. Follow me. Stay low and close.

She still wasn’t sure if she really was hearing him in her head the whole run, or if she’d developed some new symptom of crazy, but she did as he told her. They crept forward across the volcanic crust until the source of the thrum came into view.

A spaceship. One that almost blended into the landscape, all sharp edges and desolate grays. Scores of soldiers had spilled out from it, spreading out over the ground as it lifted away. They were closing in on the hangar.

Cool, cool, ’cause this has been such a cakewalk up ’til now…

They slid back down out of sight, returning to the Guv and Sybar.

“Let me guess,” she murmured to Riddick. “Necros.”

Whatever the hell Necros were, exactly.

“And a whole lot of Necro firepower,” Riddick grumbled.

“Shit!” It just figured. “I hate not being the bad guys,” she groused back.

She’d said that to Tizzy once, when they were contemplating the destruction of the New Marrakesh Spaceport, an explosion that had killed hundreds and injured thousands just to silence one man who had wanted to be a father to her. For all she’d done, and she’d done a lot of truly terrible things, there were lines she’d never cross, acts she’d never engage in… and it sickened her to be reminded that there were others who had no compunctions at all about them. Oliver. The mercs. Red Roger and his men. The settlers. The guards. Pritchard and Makarov. The Quintessa Corporation.

And Necros, whatever they were.

Guess I’ll just have to kill them, too.

She grabbed the length of her hair and twisted it, pulling it back into a makeshift bun. “I figure we got three minutes before the sun hits us again,” she observed, studying the rocky landscape around her, “burns out this whole valley.”

Their chances were slim, but maybe they could still reach the hangar—

“Wait,” Riddick said, looking meditative.

Kyra frowned at him, arming another of the guns she’d taken from the control room. Wait for what exactly? “We gonna do this or not?”

“Just wait,” he repeated, sounding almost amused.

For a second she wanted to demand whether he was crazy, until she remembered the sight of him, flying toward her in an impossible arc as a flaming maelstrom approached, pulling her into his arms by sheer will—

I trust you. She made herself relax.

“Ellen,” the Guv suddenly said from beside them. “Her name was Ellen. I never really forgot.”

He’d trotted that nameless wife story out every time he was trying to recruit someone into their gang, and the whole time…?

Guys like him need a pitch, Riddick rumbled in her head. It’s what they do after that counts.

She wondered if the Guv believed he was about to die. And then she wondered if he was right.

Gunfire erupted on the other side of the ridge. Some kind of pitched battle had begun.

The hangar’s open, she realized. Which meant the Necros and the guards were now in a fight for control over it. Busy killing each other…

Riddick was rubbing his hands together. “Remember that favorite game of yours?” he asked.

“‘Who’s the Better Killer?’” She already knew she would ultimately be its winner. Especially now that she could learn from him and add some new tricks to her repertoire.

We’ll see, kid. “Let’s play.” He freed one of his knives and turned away toward the ridge.

“Come on,” she told the Guv and Sybar, not bothering to see if they followed. Her eyes saw nothing but Riddick as she chased after him.

He launched himself into the air, killing one of the Necros in an instant and then using the fallen soldier’s gun to take out another, shooting backward without even looking and making a bullseye anyway. Part of her wished she could just watch him, the way the woman Tizzy’d killed had watched him battle Shrills. That woman hadn’t been wrong. It was art. But she had work to do.

She fired as she descended toward the runway, one ridge left between them and it, aiming at the Necros heading for them. She would give Riddick as much cover as she could, so he could go on being an artist.

“Kyra!” he suddenly called, holding out his hand to her. He didn’t need to say anything else. She could feel what he wanted. Springing the blades in the heels of her boots, she grabbed the harness in his hand and let him swing her, making her into a deadly, living scythe. She willed herself into a spin, wishing she’d had more chances to practice using her own telekinesis, but landed easily and released the harness, three more notches on her own belt.

He’s pulling ahead, she thought to herself, But I got years to catch up to him and I already have a big head start…

The Necros kept coming, trying to swarm them.

She lost track of how many she shot, how many Riddick cut to pieces. The sun was getting closer, but the moment itself seemed to have stretched out infinitely, each stroke of battle holding the sunrise at bay.

Riding a combat high…

Ewan had spoken of feeling it, of its dangerous, addictive quality. She suddenly understood, because she never wanted this feeling to end—

A gun blast sent Sybar flying through the air and back over the ridge while the Guv shouted his name. Where had that even come from?

Riddick reached back for her hand. Again, no words were necessary as she let him spin her through the air toward another Necro soldier. She landed straddling the man’s shoulders, stabbing in with her heels and then flipping herself backwards, pulling him down. Funny how, more and more, she could feel how she was violating physical laws…

…and how it was getting easier each time.

It was like being with Tizzy, she thought as she continued to carve a path through the soldiers. Somehow she was stronger around Riddick than away from him, the way she and her sister had reinforced each other’s abili­ties—

They were starting to run out of Necros.

Riddick glanced back at her as he killed another. Twenty-three to nineteen, kid. Step up your game.

Really? She shot him a withering look and took off after a soldier cresting the ridge.

A group tried to pile onto Riddick. She turned around, planning to head back to help him, and a Necro grabbed her from behind, his hand fisting in the crown of her hair.

God damn it, why’d I stop shaving my head?

Had she ever actually done that…?

She kicked and punched back­ward—

—and a knife sprouted from his eye, almost as if it had appeared from Elsewhere. Riddick had thrown it, but it suddenly occurred to her—

Why the hell am I fighting fair with these clowns? she wondered. She could be isomorphing organs out of their bodies and into another ’verse—

The Necro tried to keep fighting despite his eye wound. It took five more stabs to bring him down.

Are these guys dusted or something? She freed her knife from his corpse and turned around.

An energy bolt flew at Riddick. He managed to put the body of the Necro he was fighting between himself and it, but the blast sent both of them spinning up into the air, over the ridge between them and the run­way—

“No!” she heard herself screaming. She raced for the top of the ridge, looking down over the runway, not caring who saw her.

He was sprawled on the pavement, one of his legs bent in an unnatural position, Necros closing in on him. She watched as the Guv launched himself at their leader, and felt a terrible stab of pain go through her as the man took him apart in seconds.

She’d never told him, not once, just how much everything he’d done for her had meant to her. She’d never told him that he was the first family she’d had since she lost Tizzy. Now she’d never get to…

…and Riddick was doing the impossible, the unthink­able…

…he was not getting up.

He was trying to, struggling to rise… but failing.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to be!

Two Necros were almost on him.

Kyra took them out, the knives she buried in them giving her a conduit that let her pull key vertebrae out of U1 and into Elsewhere, as she raced for the other side of the runway and they crumpled to the ground. She turned around, willing Riddick to rise, trying to pull at him the way he had pulled at her.

“Get up,” she told him, trying to draw him up by sheer will. “Get up! Please get up!”

He stared at her as if struggling to comprehend what she was saying to him.

Two more Necros were coming after her, intent on taking her down and forcing her to flee up the hillside.

Riddick, get up! Please! She thought as she ran.

Taking both of them apart took only a moment, once she was in a more defensible position. She grabbed the second one’s pick-axe-like weapon as he fell and raced back toward the run­way—

—just as a blast of light shot over the ridge. For a moment she thought it was the sun rising, but it faded instead of intensifying.

She crested the hillside, looking down over the runway.

Bodies littered the space. Including Riddick’s. He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t see any sign that he was even breathing.

He couldn’t be dead…

But how could he be alive when she felt, suddenly, as if someone had isomorphed her heart out of her body?

In the midst of that terrible moment, scalding light poured into the valley. The sun had arrived to scour the world bare again.

With a gasp, Kyra ducked down below a small outcropping. Its shadow, she knew, wouldn’t last more than another minute.

She didn’t want to die. Maybe she’d have felt differently about it if she could have been in his arms when all this happened, but…

I want to live… I don’t want to die here like this…

The Necromonger ship hovered above her, slowly settling on the ridge just a short sprint away, its ramp lowering.

WARNING! WARNING! Its alarm sounded over and over, calling its troops—what was left of them—home.

The surviving Necromongers were climbing the ridge right next to her, racing past her without a look in her direction. One, a man in a long coat, stood quietly on the runway, not bothering to follow them. Riddick remained prone. She still couldn’t see any sign that he breathed. She couldn’t feel him…

Fuck…

A thousand fantasies rioted in her head, of running down the slope to him, dragging him into the hangar, closing the door, reviving him… being his hero the way he was hers…

A thousand dreams that would never come true. He was dead.

And if she didn’t want to die too, there was only one thing left for her to do.

He’d want me to sur­vive…

He’d admired survivors.

She leaned against the outcropping for a moment, nerving herself up. It was her last chance to live.

Kyra pushed off of the rocks and ran after the Necros, dropping her weapon to sprint at full speed and pass several of them on her way to their ship’s ramp before it could close.

It was only once she was inside, as the ramp closed and shut out the scalding daylight, that she realized she was unarmed…

…and surrounded.